Bravo Two Zero

8

I felt it was all behind me. All I had in front of me was a quick tab to the border. The mud built up around my boots. It was heavy going. My legs were burning. Physically I was wrecked. I stopped to get some scoff down my neck. It felt good. I drank some water and forced myself to calm down and take stock. Navigation was easy enough. The mast was right ahead of me. As I walked I tried to work out what had happened during the contacts. But there had been total confusion, and I couldn’t make sense of it. There was still firing behind me.

It was the early hours of the 27^th, and I had about 2-3 miles to go. In normal circumstances I could run that in less than twenty minutes with my equipment on. But there was no point just running blindly towards Syria with only an hour of darkness left. I didn’t know what the border crossing was like physically-if it was a fence or a high berm, if it was heavily defended or not defended at all. And even if I did get into Syria during daylight hours, what sort of reception could I expect?

I was about a half mile south of the Euphrates and a half mile north of a town. The area was irrigated by diesel pumps at intervals along the river. The field crops were about eighteen inches high. I had kept off the tracks and moved through the center of the fields, putting my feet down on the root mounds of the plants. Even so, I knew I couldn’t avoid leaving sign. My hope was that no one would be out in the fields the next day, tending what, apart from the frost, seemed to be a healthy young crop.

I was feeling very positive. I’d survived the contacts, and that was all that seemed to matter. The last contact was like a big barrier that I’d got over and got away from, and now I was a free spirit.

In many ways this was the most dangerous time. Probably since caveman times, people have been cautious when they plan an operation, aggressive when they execute it, and most open to error when it’s finished and they’re on the home straight. That’s when people start to get slack and the major dramas occur. It’s not over yet, I kept saying to myself-it’s so near but also it’s so bloody far.

Adrenaline during the contacts and the constant roller coaster of the night’s events had blocked the pain signals from reaching my brain. A soldier of the Black Watch during the First World War was shot four times and still kept charging forwards. When he finally took the position and had time to assess his injuries, he keeled over. You don’t realize what’s been happening to your body because your mind blanks it out. Now I’d calmed down a bit and the future was looking rosy, I was starting to realize how physically impaired I was. All the aches and pains of the last couple of days suddenly started coming through. I was covered with cuts and bruises. In contacts you’re jumping and leaping around, and your body’s taking knocks all the time. You don’t notice them at the time. There were deep pressure-cuts on my hands, knees, and elbows, and painful bruising on the sides of both my legs. I had scratches and scrapes from thorn bushes and gashes from wire; the sting of them added to the ambient pain level. We’d tabbed close to 125 miles over hard bedrock and shale, and the leather was starting to fall off my boots. My feet were in a bad way. They were soaking wet and felt like blocks of ice. I just about had some sensation left in my toes. My clothing was ripped and torn, and my hands were covered with thick grease and grime, as if I’d been working on an engine for the last couple of days. My body was covered in mud, and as I walked along it was slowly drying out. Trickles of sweat fell down my back, and big clammy patches formed between my legs and under my armpits. My extremities were frozen, but at least my trunk was warm because I was moving.

It was still very cold. The mud had a film of ice over the top. The first foot or so of any large pool of water was frozen solid. It was a beautiful crystal night. The stars were glittering, and had it been anywhere else in the world, you’d have gone out and marveled at it. But the clearness of the sky meant there were no clouds to obscure the full moon in the west, and no wind to disperse the noise.

Scattered here and there were little outhouses, some with a light on, some with a generator going. I could see lights from the town to the south. Dogs barked; I skirted around buildings, hoping that nobody would pay attention to them.

Car lights in the distance made me flap. Were they part of the follow-up? Were they going to start searching the fields now? It wasn’t a very good place for me to be. There was only half an hour of darkness left-not enough for me to get around the town or even go straight through it and get into the curls on the other side.

As the lights gradually faded I made a quick appreciation. Like the old Clash song, should I go or should I stay? Did I hide up or did I go for the border and try to get over before first light? What were the chances of the Iraqis following up during the day? There certainly hadn’t been any follow-up so far. Perhaps they thought I’d already crossed the border and was away.

The houses looked so inviting. Should I get into one of these small buildings where you’ve just got the old boy and his fire and stay there with him for the day? I’d have shelter, and the possibility of food and water-and in theory a better chance of being concealed. But you never use isolated or obvious cover. It’s a natural draw point for any hunter force. In films you see all these characters living in hay barns. It’s pure and utter fantasy. If you’re there they’ll find you. None of this hiding under a straw bale business, just narrowly being missed by a probing bayonet.

My best chance was in the open but concealed, preferably from the ground and air. I had to assume the worst scenario, which was that the Iraqis would have spotter aircraft up. I found a drainage ditch that was about 3 feet wide and 18 inches deep, with water coursing through under gravity. I got in and moved along, pleased not to be leaving sign in the muddy water. The water was moving from east to west, my direction of travel.

I looked at my watch, checking off the minutes till daybreak. I stopped every few feet and looked around, listening, planning the next movement, planning my actions on: What if the enemy moved in from the front? What if I had a contact from the left? I remembered the ground I’d been over and planned the best escape route in each contingency.

After 900 or 1,200 feet I saw a dark shape ahead. It was either a small dam or. a natural culvert. When I got closer, I saw that a track running north-south from the Euphrates to the built-up area had a steel plate over it as a makeshift bridge, the sort of thing you see at roadworks in the UK. It was just coming up to first light. I had to make a decision. I could go further along the ditch and hope to find something better, or I could just stay put. On balance, I thought I was better off where I was.

The only problem with the culvert was that when you look at things in the dark and under pressure, they can look pretty good, but in the daytime the picture can be totally different. You have to be so careful choosing an LUP at night in an area that is virgin to you. When I was in the battalion at Tidworth we had mirror image barracks, the Green Jackets in one, the Light Infantry in the other. One night, I came back from town with a bag of chips and curry sauce, pissed as a fart. I stumbled into my room, dropped my trousers, and got into bed. Sitting up eating my chips with my head spinning and the bedside light on, I couldn’t understand it when a bloke called out, “Turn the light off, Geordie.” I looked up and saw a Debbie Harry poster, and I didn’t like Debbie Harry. “Who the fuck’s that over there then?” the voice demanded, but by then I had realized what I’d done. I abandoned my chips, grabbed my trousers, and ran for my life from the Light Infantry barracks.

I belly crawled under the steel span. The culvert wasn’t as deep as the drainage ditch itself because it hadn’t been cleared, but the prospect of resting my limbs far outweighed the discomfort of lying in the cold mud.

I retrieved the map cover from the pocket on my leg and tried to use it as some sort of insulation, but to no avail. My mind strayed to food. I might be needing it later on, but then again I might be captured. It was better to get it down my neck than to have it taken away. I pulled my last sachet-steak and onions-from the pouch on my belt kit and ripped it open. I ate with my fingers and stuck my tongue into the recesses for the last of the cold, slimy gunge. For pudding, I put my lips to the level of the water and sucked up a few mouthfuls. I got the map on top of me, ready to look at when there was enough light, and just lay back and waited.

As dark turned to light, I heard trucks in the distance and isolated bits of hollering and shouting, but nothing near enough to cause alarm. It was almost peaceful. I started to shiver, and the trembling became uncontrollable. My teeth chattered. I took a deep breath and tensed all my muscles as tightly as I could. I stayed like that for two hours.

I had my fighting knife in my hand and my watch out on my chest so I didn’t have to keep moving my hands. I studied the map to make an appreciation of where I was. If I had to leg it the last thing I wanted to do was map-read. I wanted to know that, as I came out, to my left would be the built-up area, to my right would be the Euphrates, and that I had however many miles to run to the border. I wanted to store as much information in my head as I could.

I went through different scenarios, fantasies really. What if I was already in Syria? I knew I hadn’t crossed the border: the two countries were at war; there had to be some physical barrier between them, but that didn’t stop me daydreaming.

It must have been about eight o’clock when I heard the scuffle of goats’ hooves coming from the direction of the town. I tensed. We hadn’t had the world’s best luck with goats on this trip.

I didn’t hear the goat herder until he was right on top of the metal plate. I took a deep breath, a really deep breath. Straining my neck, I saw the ends of two sandals and a set of big, splayed toes. One foot came down into the mud. I gripped my fighting knife. I wouldn’t do anything until he put his head down and actually saw me, and even then I didn’t know what I was going to do. Did I just bring the left hand up and stick him one in the face? If he started running, what then? I could tell by the big choggie, splayed feet that he wasn’t military, so hopefully he wasn’t armed.

He stooped to pick up a small cardboard box I hadn’t noticed in the ditch. It was a discarded ammunition box for 7.62 short, the round that AKs fire. He disappeared from view. The box landed back in the water. He must have looked at it and decided it was of no use.

A couple of goats came and stood on the bank. I didn’t want to breathe, I didn’t want to blink. The goat herder made his way back on to the bridge and stood with his toes dangling over the edge of the steel. He coughed up a massive grolly out of the back of his neck and flobbed it into the water. It drifted down to me like a slimy green jellyfish and lodged itself in my hair. I was in such a mess anyway that it shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did.

I was sure that one of the goats would get into the water and make the old boy come and rescue him, but nothing happened. The goats all trundled over, and the goat herder followed. I started to scrape the slime out of my hair.

I lay listening to noises. Looking out from my tomb, I could see that it was a crisp winter’s morning with not a cloud in the sky. It was a view of the countryside, not at all a desert scene. All it needed was cows, and it could have been the fields around Hereford. There’s a small footpath which follows the banks of the River Wye, and from a certain point you can look over to the other side at a dairy which has its own cows. Kate used to love being taken there. It looked nothing at all like the scene I was looking at now, but I imagined cows mooing and the sound of Kate giggling. The sun was out, but I was out of range of its warming rays. I felt like a lizard stuck where I was. It would be so nice to be out in the open, warming the bones.

I could hear vehicles in the distance-the springy, old me tally jangly sounds of them trundling along. Kids and older people hollered and shrieked. I was desperate to know what was going on out there. Were they looking for me? Or were they just going about their normal business? In one way it concerned me greatly that people were in the vicinity, but in another it just sounded nice and comforting to hear human voices because it meant I wasn’t alone. I was cold and exhausted. It was good to have some kind of reassurance that I was on earth, not Zanussi.

Sometimes a vehicle would come nearer and nearer and nearer, and my heart would start skipping beats.

Are they going to stop?

Don’t be so stupid-no drama, they’re going to the river.

They must be looking.

But not intensively-it’s too near the border.

The noises were scary. By the time they got to me my mind had magnified them a hundred times. I flapped about the kids being curious. Kids must play. Did they play in the water? Did they play with the goats? What did they do? A kid is shorter than an adult and would get a better perspective when looking at the culvert. Instead of seeing daylight a kid was going to see my head or my feet, and he wouldn’t need to have passed his eleven plus to know that he should raise the alarm.

I wanted so much not to get caught. Not now. Not after so much.

I kept looking at the watch lying on my chest. I looked once and it was one o’clock. Half an hour later I checked again. It was five past. Time was dragging, but I started to feel better about my predicament.

There had been vehicles, goats, and goatherds, and I’d got away with it. I was still trying to memorize the map, going through the routes in my mind. I was gagging for last light.

There was a deafening rattle of steel as a group of vehicles thundered across. This time they stopped.

You’re compromised: what did they stop for? You’re in the shit.

No worries, they’re picking somebody up. Just keep remarkably still, control your breathing.

I tried hard to think positively, as if that would stop them coming and finding me.

7.62 is a big-caliber round. The sound of over a hundred of them reverberating on the steel plate just a fraction of an inch from my nose was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I curled up and silently screamed.

Fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck!

Men bellowed at the tops of their voices. They fired all around the drainage ditch. The mud erupted. I felt the tremors. I curled up even tighter and hoped nothing was going to hit. The cracks, thuds, and shouts seemed never-ending.

The firing stopped but the shouting continued. What were they going to do now-just stick a weapon underneath and blow me away, or what?

I was shitting myself. I didn’t know what they wanted me to do. I couldn’t understand what they were screaming. Did they want to capture me? Did they want to kill me? Were they going to throw a grenade in? Fuck it, I thought, if they want me out, they’ll have to drag me out.

I was going to die in a drainage ditch two and a half miles from the border, of that I had no doubt. My nose was more or less touching the underside of the steel plate. I was stretching my neck, but I couldn’t see much because of the perspective.

The muzzle of a rifle came down. Then a bloke’s face. When he saw me there was a look of total and utter surprise. He did a little jump back and shouted.

The next thing I saw was a mass of boots jumping down all around the drainage ditch itself. Three blokes at either end, yelling their heads off. They motioned for me to get out.

No fucking way!

They wanted to see my hands. I was lying on my back with my feet and hands out straight. Two blokes grabbed a boot each and heaved.

I came out on my back and had my first view of Syria in the daylight. It looked the most beautiful country on earth. I could see the mast on the higher ground, tantalizingly close. I could almost have reached out and touched it. I felt burgled or mugged-the feeling of disbelief that this was happening to me at all, mixed with outrage that I was being robbed of something that was rightfully mine.

Why me? All my life I’ve been lucky. I’ve been in dramas that I’ve had no control of, and I’ve been in problems that I’ve created myself. But I’ve always been lucky enough to get out of them reasonably unscathed.

They gave a couple of kicks and motioned for me to get to my feet. I stood up straight, my hands up in the air, staring straight ahead. Nice blue sky it was, absolutely splendid. I turned my back on Syria and looked at the ploughed fields and green vegetation, and all the huts and tracks that I’d avoided during the night.

So much effort wasted. So few hours of daylight left.

They held their weapons nervously and jumped up and down, making weird warbling noises like Red Indians. They were as frightened as I was. They fired into the air on automatic, and I thought, Here we go, all I need is for one of these rounds to come down and slot me through the head.

Two Land Cruisers were parked to the right-hand side of the bridge. Three characters were pacing around on the steel plate; eight or nine others were charging around on the banks of the ditch.

The countryside looked even more European than I had imagined. I was pissed off with myself. To be picked up in featureless desert would have been bad luck, but to be captured like this on ground that could have been in northwest Europe was bloody bad management.

The squad dies were all over the place, gibbering and gab bering still very wary. Now that they’d got me they were not too sure what to do with me. It seemed there were more chiefs than Indians; everybody wanted to give orders. There must have been some sort of reward coming their way. I stood motionless in the mud, a pathetic mess. I stared straight ahead, no smile of appeasement, no grim scowl of defrance, no hint of eye contact. My training had taken over. Already I was trying to be the gray man.

They started firing into the ground. They were in an unbelievable frenzy. It seemed wrong to me that I was going to get shot by accident rather than doing a job or in a contact with me firing back. Nothing death or glory about it: I just didn’t want to die because some trigger-happy dickhead was going hyper. Or worse, get severely injured. But there’s no way you show them that you’re scared in a situation like that; you just stand there, take a deep breath, close your eyes, and let them get on with it.

The firing stopped after about fifteen seconds. One of the soldiers jumped down into the culvert and started rooting around for my kit. He came back with the map, which was unmarked, the belt kit, and the fighting knife. He brandished the blade in front of me and did the old throat-cutting motion. I thought, it’s going to be one of them days.

One of the other soldiers was poking me with his weapon and gesturing for me to get down on my knees.

Is he going to kill me? Is it time to die now?

I couldn’t think of any other reason why I’d get put on my knees. If they were taking me away, they’d drag me away or motion me somewhere.

So do I get down and wait for the possibility of getting shot, or do I make a run for it?

I wouldn’t get far. I’d be killed within five steps. I knelt down in the water and thick mud.

The bottom of the drainage ditch was about 18 inches lower than the level of the fields, so when I finally got down I was more or less at face level with the steel plate. I looked up.

The penalty kick that one of the lads aimed at my jaw knocked me backwards into the ditch. Water sluiced into my ears, and white blotches of intense light filled my vision. I opened my eyes. Through the star bursts I saw the world closing in with people and a clear blue sky that was about to rain rifle butts.

Even when you’re winded your body’s self-protection mechanism makes it spin itself over. Face down in the mud, I curled up into a tight ball. There’s an old saying in parachuting, if it’s a bit windy and you know the landing is going to be fearsome: “Feet and knees together and accept the landing.” I had to accept this one; there was nothing I could do to stop it. Compared with being shot, it was almost a pleasant surprise.

They were like little animals, putting in a bit of a kick, moving off, coming in again, starting to gain confidence. They grabbed hold of my hair and wrenched my head back. As they kicked and thumped my body in a frenzy of pent-up frustration, they screamed: “Tel Aviv! Tel Aviv!”

They jumped from the bridge onto my back and legs. You feel each impact but not its pain. Your system’s pumping too much adrenaline. You tighten your stomach, clench your teeth, tense your body as much as you can, and hope and hope they’re not going to start to give you a really serious filling-in.

“Tel Aviv! Tel Aviv!” they shouted over an dover. It dawned on me what they were getting at. This was not a good day out.

It can’t have lasted for more than five minutes, but it was quite long enough. When they finally backed off, I turned over and looked up at them. I wanted them to see how confused and pitiful I looked, a poor fellow soldier who was terrified and meek and deserving of their pity.

It didn’t work.

I knew it was going to start all over again, and I rolled into a ball, trying this time to get my arms underneath me. My mind was numb, but I was more or less conscious throughout. The thudding instep kicks to my head and sides were punctuated by telling, well aimed toecap blows to the kidneys, mouth, and ears.

They stopped after a few minutes and hauled me to my feet. I could hardly stand. I was in a semi crouched position, trying to keep my head down, staggering about, holding my stomach, coughing up blood.

I swayed and lost my footing. Two boys came either side. They did a rough search-no more than a perfunctory frisk to make sure I didn’t have a gun-then they knocked me to my knees and pushed my face down into the mud. They pulled my hands behind my back and tied them. I tried to get my head up so I could breathe, but they were standing on it to force me down. I gasped and inhaled mud and blood. I thought I was going to suffocate. All I could hear was hollering and shouting, and then the noise of more firing in the air. Every sound was magnified. My head raged with pain.

The next thing I knew, I was being frog marched towards the vehicles. My legs wouldn’t carry me, so they had to support me under the armpits. They were moving fast, and I was still coughing and snorting and trying to get some air into my lungs. My face was swelling up. My lips were split in several places. I just let them get on with it. I was a rag doll, a bag of shit.

I was thrown into the rear of a Land Cruiser, in the foot well behind the front seats. As soon as they put me down, I tried to get myself nice and comfy and sort myself out. It felt strangely secure to be in such an enclosed space. At least they’d stopped kicking me and I could breathe again. I felt the warm heater and smelled cigarette smoke and cheap aftershave.

I got a rifle butt to the head. It hurt severely and took me down. I wasn’t going to come up from that one even if I’d wanted to. I was a bag of bollocks. There was massive pain in the back of my head, and everything was spinning. I took short, sharp breaths and told myself that it could be worse. For a second or two it looked as though I was going to be right. I wasn’t being filled in any more, which I thought was rather nice. Then two lads jumped in the back and thumped their boots hard up and down all over my body. As the vehicle lurched across the field, they kept up the tempo.

I couldn’t see where we were going because I had to keep my head down to protect myself from the flurry of boots. It would have been a pointless exercise anyway. As far as I was concerned, they were just going to shoot me. I had no control over it; I just wanted to get it over and done with. I’d had the initial shock of being captured, then the demoralizing glimpse of the Syrian border. It suddenly hit home. I was right on top of Syria and I’d got caught. It was as if I’d run a marathon in Olympic time and been disqualified a stride from the tape. I wondered again when they’d shoot me.

The vehicle swerved and lurched to avoid the crowds. When they slowed down, I could hear people hollering and shouting. Everybody was in a frenzy; they were really happy boys.

The jundies fired their weapons from inside the Land Cruiser. The AK47 is a large-caliber weapon, and when you fire it in a confined space, you can feel the increase in air pressure. It was deafening, but the familiar tang of cordite was oddly comforting. I started to taste the blood and mud in my mouth. My nose was blocked with clots.

I was bouncing up and down, the vehicle moving fast over the ploughed ground. The suspension groaned and screeched. All I wanted to do was snuggle up in a corner somewhere and be out of the way. One half of my brain was telling me to close my eyes and take a deep breath, and maybe it would all go away. But at the back of your mind is that tiny little bit of survival instinct: let’s wait and see, maybe they won’t, there’s always a chance…

The crowds were making the fearsome Red Indian warbling noise. They were jubilant that they’d caught somebody, but I couldn’t tell if the warble was a victory salute or a sign of even worse things to come. As we lurched over the field, I tried to concentrate on identifying the troops from their uniforms. They wore British-pattern DPM (disrupted-pattern material), with chest webbing that held five magazines, and high laced boots. They had Para wings, too, and red lanyards, which marked them out as elite commandos. It was only much later that I learned that the lanyards were to commemorate a victory from the Second World War, when they fought under Montgomery’s command, of which they seemed quite proud.

We hit a meta led road and the bouncing stopped. I wasn’t much concerned with where we were going at this stage-I just wanted to get there and to stop being filled in by these boys’ boots. The soldiers jabbered at me fast and aggressively.

The vehicle stopped. We seemed to be in the town. Noise surged around us. I heard voices, many voices, and I knew from their tone that it was an angry mob. The sound of hatred is ugly and universal. I looked up. I saw a sea of faces, military and civilian, angry, chanting, shouting abuse. I felt like a child in a pram with a gang of adults peering in. It scared me. These people hated me.

An old man dug deep into his TB-riddled lungs and fired a green wad into my face. Other salvoes followed, thick and fast. Then came the physical stuff. It started with a poke in my ribs, a testing prod at the new commodity in town. The poke became a shove, then a slap, then a punch, and the crowd started pulling my hair. I thought it was going to be a case of mob rule. I felt I was going to get lynched, or worse.

They started to climb aboard. There was uncontrolled frenzy. Perhaps it was the first time they’d seen a white-eyed soldier. Perhaps they held me personally responsible for their dead and wounded friends and family members. They closed in and slapped and punched, pulled my mustache and hair. There was a gagging stench of unwashed bodies. It was like a horror film with zombies. All daylight was blocked out, and I thought I was going to suffocate.

More and more shots were fired into the air, and I began to worry that it wouldn’t be long before they got bored with using clouds as targets. The useless thought came to me that they must be taking casualties from firing in built-up areas. Rounds have spent their explosive force when they come down, but they still come down with a deadly momentum. No doubt they’d blame me for those deaths as well.

What were the soldiers going to do, I wondered-just let the civvies have me? Kill me now, I thought. I’d rather have the squad dies do it than the crowd. The soldiers started pushing the people away. It was a wonderful feeling. Just a minute ago they were bearing me up; now these boys were my saviors. Better the devil you know…

I was lying on my stomach at the back of the Land Cruiser, my hands still tied, and they started to drag me out feet first. The hollering of obscenities got louder. I concentrated on looking dejected and badly injured and on working out how I was going to protect my face as I fell two feet or so onto the tarmac. The solution was to spin around on to my back because then I could keep my head up. I managed to do it just in time. I lifted my head, and the base of my spine took the force of the drop, detonating an explosion of pain inside my skull. All the breath was knocked out of me. The soldiers were really playing the macho man, waving at everybody, shaking their AKs in the air Che Guevara style. They looked so butch, I thought, doing this in front of the girls. They were the real local teddies; they’d obviously be scoring tonight.

The vehicle had stopped about 50 feet from a big pair of gates set in a wall 10 feet high. I got the impression we were at the local military camp. They dragged me on my back towards the gates. I had to arch to save my hands from scraping along the road. Still there was mass hysteria. I was scared: the fear of the unknown. These people looked and sounded so very out of control.

At last I was dragged inside and the gates slammed behind us. I took in a large courtyard and a selection of buildings. The macho act ended at once, and the squad dies hoiked me to my feet and pulled me on by my arms. You’ve got to take time to have a look around, to tune in. If you do the hard man routine, stick your chest out and say fuck you, they’ll fill you in again, and that’s counterproductive. If you appear to be subdued and sapped, they’ve got the effect they want. It’s now that you’ve got to start going to town with your injuries. You’ve got to look feeble, as if everything’s on top of you and you’re totally and utterly clueless. Quite apart from anything else, it preserves what energy you’ve got left so that you’re ready for your escape, which is of primary concern, I felt I’d passed a major test. I was in another world; another drama had ended. In a weird way I almost felt safe, now that the local population couldn’t get their hands on me. The prospect of that seemed so much worse than anything fellow soldiers might do to me. I exaggerated the limp, shivering and coughing, and moaned every time someone got hold of me. It must have seemed a wonder I was alive, the way I was going on. I was in a bad way, but my mental state was good, and that’s the one you’ve got to worry about and conceal from the enemy.

For a few minutes I stood there with a ring of guards around me. As I looked straight ahead, there was a meta led road going to a block about 300 feet ahead. Looking around from left to right, I saw barrack blocks to the right, following the line of the wall, and a small clump of trees.

Then I saw some poor bastard lying on the grass, trussed up on his stomach like a chicken, his ankles and wrists tied together. He was trying to lift his legs to take the pressure off his head. He’d obviously been given a good hammering. His head had swollen up to the size of a football, and his kit was torn and covered in blood. I couldn’t even see the color of his hair or whether his clothes were camouflage-pattern. For a moment, as he lifted his head, we had eye-to-eye, and I realized it was Dinger.

The eyes give so much away. They can tell you when a person is drunk, when he’s bluffing, when he’s alert, when he’s happy. They are the window to the mind. EHnger’s eyes said: It’s going to be all right. I even got a small smile out of him. I grinned back. I had a fearsome dread for him because he was in such a bad state, but it was wonderful to see him, to have somebody there to share my predicament. Selfishly, I was chuffed I wasn’t the only one to be caught. The slagging if I got back to Hereford would have been unbearable.

The down side of seeing him was the realization that it was my turn next. He was really in a bad way, yet he was much harder than me. It occurred to me that I could be dead by the end of the afternoon. If so, I just wanted to get it over and done with.

A couple of boys with weapons were lounging against a tree near Dinger, smoking cigarettes. They didn’t stop when two officers and their little entourage came out of their office and walked halfway up the road to meet us. I just stood there, playing on the injuries, working on the principle that you don’t know anything until you try. Mentally I prepared myself for another filling in. As the officers approached, I clenched my teeth and pressed my knees together to protect my balls.

The local military had incurred a lot of casualties, and it was clear that these well-dressed officers, a mixture of commando officers in DPM and ordinary types in olive green with stars on their shoulders, were not impressed. My head was pushed up, and one of them took a swing. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the next punch. It didn’t come.

Another officer was jabbering away, and I opened one eye just enough to see what the conversation was about. The rupert who had hit me had a knife in his hand now and was walking towards me. Here we go, I thought, he’s going to show the jundies how hard he is. He jabbed it under the bottom of my smock and ripped it upwards. The smock fell open.

The jundies were told to search me, but they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They must have heard weird stories about exploding suicide devices or something because they were paranoid. In my pockets they found two pencils and inspected them as if they contained arsenic or rocket fuel. One soldier cut off my ID tags and took them away. I felt suddenly naked without them. Worse than that, I was sterile, a man with no name. Removing my tags was as good as removing my identity.

Two others took the Syrettes of morphine that were hanging round my neck and went through the motions of sticking them into their arms. They were cock-a-hoop and would obviously be shooting it up later on. I had a toothbrush in a pen pocket in the sleeves of my DPM shirt, but they refused to touch it. Maybe they didn’t understand what it was doing there. Maybe, if the smell of the mob outside had been anything to go by, they didn’t even know what a toothbrush was. Whatever, they weren’t taking chances. They made me take it out myself.

The body search was from the top down, but it was badly done and they didn’t even make me take off my clothes. They removed my boots and looted every item of kit. They behaved like old ladies at a jumble sale. We always use pencils rather than pens because pencils always work, even in the rain. I had a couple of three-inch stubs, sharpened at both ends so that if I was writing and one end snapped, I’d just have to turn it around and on I’d go. They went as souvenirs. So did the Swiss Army knife and a Silva compass I had in my pocket, both on lengths of para cord Every bit of kit is attached to you securely. There was a notebook, but it had nothing in it. I’d destroyed its contents at the first LUP. There was my white plastic racing spoon from an American ration set, and that, too, was tied on a length of para cord in my pocket. My watch was around my neck on cord so that I couldn’t be compromised by the luminous glow and it wouldn’t catch on anything as I patrolled. Even the spare plastic bag I had in case I’d needed a shit while on patrol was snaffled.

Around my waist, however, on a one-inch webbing belt, was today’s star prize: about 1700 pounds in sterling, in the form of twenty gold sovereigns we had each been given as escape money. I had fixed my coins to the belt with masking tape, and this created a major drama. They jumped back, shouting what I assumed was the Iraqi for “Let him go! He’s going to explode!”

A captain arrived. He couldn’t have been more than about 5’2” tall but must have weighed over 13 stone. He looked like a boiled egg. He was aggressive, speaking good English quickly and brusquely.

“Okay, what is your name?”

“Andy.”

“Okay, Andy, what I want you to do is give me the information I want. If you don’t, these men will shoot you.”

I looked around me. The soldiers were standing in a tight cordon; if they fired, they would wipe each other out.

“What is the equipment you have there?” he asked, pointing at the masking tape.

“Gold,” I said.

That word must be as international as jeans or Pepsi, and in every army in the world the soldiers like the chance to make a little earner. Everybody’s eyes lit up-even the jundies.” This was their chance to make more money in one hit than they probably earned in a year. I could see them planning their holidays and buying their new cars. I suddenly remembered a story I’d heard about one of the US soldiers who was among the troops who invaded Panama. In an office belonging to President Noriega he found three million US dollars in cash-and the knobber actually got on the radio and reported it. It was taken off to regimental HQ, and that was probably the last anybody ever saw of it. The bloke who told me the story said he couldn’t sleep at night just thinking about the opportunity that had been thrown away.

The ruperts were taking no chances. They dragged me away to another office and told me to put the belt on the table.

“Why do you have gold?” the fat man barked.

“To pay people if we run out of food,” I said. “It’s bad to steal.”

“Open it up.”

The ruperts stationed two of the jundies in the room with me and then left, presumably in case I was lying and was about to explode a string of incendiary devices. I pulled out the first gold sovereign, and the ruperts were summoned. They dismissed the two squad dies and divided the sovereigns between themselves. They tried to look so official and solemn as they did it, but it was blatantly obvious what they were up to.

It was probably thanks to the ruperts’ greed that my silk escape map and miniature compass weren’t found. They were both hidden in my uniform, and a thorough search would have unearthed them. I was chuffed to have them still. It was a wonderful feeling: you don’t know this, big nose, but I’ve still got an escape map and compass, so up yours. The best time to escape is as soon as possible after capture. The further you go down the chain, the harder it is to escape, because the system caters more and more efficiently for a prisoner. Frontline troops have other problems on their minds, but further down the line the security is better and you’ve most likely been stripped of your uniform. From the moment I was captured I had been trying to orientate myself so that I knew which way was west. If the chance came my way, I’d need these vital items.

Blindfolded now, I was taken to another room. I sensed it was large and airy. There were bodies in there talking; the atmosphere was more subdued. I could tell by the more regulated voices that this was the Head Shed’s room. It felt strangely secure. I felt I was out of danger somehow, far from the madding crowd, even though I suspected what was going to happen. Then I realized that though the people sounded more in control, if they filled me in they’d do it more professionally.

There was a strong smell of coffee, Gitanes, and cheap aftershave. I was pushed down onto a chair with a cushioned seat and high back. Part of me felt I wasn’t there. My mind was going into some sort of fantasy to block it out, as if it was all a dream. I had never once considered that anything like this could happen to me. The feeling was the same as if I’d been driving a car and knocked down a child: complete and total disbelief. My mind was hearing things, but I was enclosed in my own little world. I snapped out of it and thought about trying to get their pity, or a cup of coffee or something to eat. But I wasn’t going to ask for jack shit. If they gave me something all well and good, but I wasn’t going to beg.

I clenched my muscles, put my head down, gripped my legs together. I guessed that before they got down to some proper tactical questioning, they would take their frustrations out on me. They were murmuring to each other.

So what’s it to be, I thought. A fearsome torture?

Or am I going to get fucked?

Men milled around, whispering. The tiniest sound is magnified when you’re trying so hard to hear. A chair scraped. Somebody got to his feet and came towards me.

I braced myself. Here it comes. I pretended to shiver. I wanted so much for these people to feel sorry for me.

Two seconds felt like two minutes. It was unbelievably frustrating not to be able to see what was going on. I shivered again, the injured, pathetic creature, the man who knew nothing, the man not worth doing anything to. But I knew I was grasping at straws. Head down, I tried to show no reaction as he approached.

There was a strong waft of coffee, and I longed to be in Ross’s cafe in Peckham with a big frothy coffee in front of me. On Saturdays as young lads we’d go down and get two sausage and chips, pile on the salt and vinegar, and get a frothy coffee. Ross the Greek would let us spend all morning there. We can’t have been more than eight or nine. My mum always gave me the money to go and get my dinner at Ross’s; she knew it was the big thing. In wintertime there would be condensation running down the windows and that strong, strong coffee smell. It was such a snug and cozy place to sit. It came back to me so vividly that for a brief moment I felt like a child who has fallen over and is crying for his mum.

There was no way Dinger would have gone into his cover story yet. Name, number, rank, date of birth, the Big Four-that’s all he would have given. I thought: I’m going to get severely filled in here because they’re going to want a lot more than that. I sort of hoped maybe they won’t be asking me now; maybe they’ll be asking me later. Maybe they’ll just be taking their frustrations out now. Maybe no one can speak English! My mind was racing at incredible speed as this character got nearer and nearer, and finally stopped just inches away.

He pulled my head up and punched me hard in the face. The blow knocked me backwards and to one side, but they were surrounding me, and I was pushed back upright. Even when you’re expecting a punch like that, you’re shocked when it comes. I wanted to stay down because it would give me time to rest before the next one, time to think. Everybody piled in. There was laughter as they tried to outdo each other’s efforts. I felt drunk. You know what’s happening, you know what’s going on, but there’s nothing you can do to control it. You begin to feel detached. It’s happening to you, but your mind takes over and says Fuck this, I’m not having much more of this, and you start drifting into unconsciousness. You can feel it happening, but your mind goes off into a wander. I was being punched into a semi stupor

I let myself drop to the floor because at least then I could protect my face. I drew my knees up and kept them together, kept my head down, kept myself clenched up. As the blows rained down I screamed and moaned. Some of it was put on. A lot of it wasn’t.

Then, as if on a signal, the beating stopped.

“Poor Andy, poor Andy,” I heard, and a mock clucking of concern.

I got to my knees and put my head against the man and shook it. I leant against him, my breathing heavy and rasping because my nose was so clogged with blood and mud. I started sinking to the floor again. I needed his help to get me up. This gives time, I thought, this stalls the operation. Hopefully they’ll come to their senses and see that I’m just a pathetic, useless cretin, not worth the effort, and leave me alone.

I was helped back into the chair and somebody dead legged me. I screamed. Even as a schoolboy I used to hate dead legs-and they were just the variety that were delivered with the knee. This was a full blooded kick. Boots flew in from all directions again. I went straight down.

You know the sensible thing to do is to appear weak and plead with them for mercy, but something takes over. I was so angry that I made a conscious decision once more not to beg. There was no way I was going to demean myself. They were going to do it anyway. I knew it was counterproductive to resist, but you can’t fight your pride and self-respect. If I moaned, that would only give them more pleasure. The only way I could beat them was by my mental attitude, and beat them I would. By keeping as quiet as I could, I was winning a small battle. Even the slightest imagined victory is magnified a thousand times. I’m winning this, I thought. Ridiculously, I felt my morale soar. Fuck ‘em, I said to myself-don’t give them the satisfaction of going home for their tea and saying to their mates, “Yeah, he was begging us to stop.”

They didn’t stop. Boots swung into my ribs and head, steel toe caps connected with soft shins. There was no point to what they were doing; everybody was just being macho. My only hope was that they’d get bored with it soon.

A couple of them started sounding off in English, denouncing Bush, Thatcher, everybody they could think of. My body was starting to throw its hand in. I felt limp and drained. It was difficult to breathe. I had already been deprived of my sense of sight; now everything was swollen and throbbing, and I felt my other senses numbing, too. My heart pounded so strongly it was creating its own chest pain.

I could hear screams and anguished groans. They must have come from me.

Somebody shouted into my face from inches away and then laughed manic ally “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” and backed off.

I should have had the sense to become a quivering wreck and let them laugh about it and say, “Ah, bless his cotton socks, leave him alone, what a dickhead.”

But I just lay there and took it.

“You are the tool of Bush, Andy,” one of them said, “but you will not be for long because we are going to kill you.”

I took the threat seriously. He had just confirmed my worst fears. They would give us both a good kicking, then take us off and slot us.

Good, I thought, let’s get on with it then.

They dragged me to my feet again. Blood was pouring down my face from gashes in my scalp. It trickled into my eyes and mouth. My lips were numb, as if I’d been to the dentist. I couldn’t control them to blow the blood away. I bent my head forward to redirect the flow and to avoid any eye-to-eye contact. I didn’t want these bastards to see what I was thinking.

For another fifteen minutes people continued to take turns at punching and slapping, often not even bothering to put me back on the chair. I stayed crunched up as tightly as I could. A pair of hands grabbed my feet and started to drag me across the room so that the others could get an improved angle on their kicking. This is way out of control, I thought. Any more of this and I’m going to be well out of the game.

The blindfold had come off by now with the hustle and tussle of events. I didn’t bother looking that much. All I saw was my knees hard against my face, and the light-cream lino floor, once beautifully polished but now smeared with mud and blood. I was finding it more and more difficult to draw breath. I was really getting concerned about the long-term effects. I felt my body disintegrating. I could die here-and the only good thing about it would be that I’d mucked up their floor.

The back of my throat was rattling. I coughed blood. Another twenty minutes, I thought, and we’d be into serious damage. That would really slow down my chances of escape.

At last they must have tired of the game. I was a bag of shit, they’d got me where they wanted me, there was little point going on.

I lay there on the floor, drenched with my own blood. There was filth and gore everywhere. Even my feet were bleeding. My khaki socks were wet and dark red.

I opened my eyes for a moment and caught a glimpse of a pair of brown Chelsea boots with zippers on the side, and a pair of bell-bottomed jeans. The boots had cheap and nasty plastic heels, the stuff that Saturday markets are made of. The jeans were dirty and faded, and well and truly flared. Whoever was wearing them probably had on a David Cassidy T-shirt as well under his uniform shirt. Glancing up quickly, I saw that they were all ruperts, very clean-cut and smooth-faced, not a hair out of place. Everybody had a mustache and hair that was sleeked back. The Saddam look was in.

I lay in a corner against the wall, trying to protect myself. There were people on three sides of me. Their faces loomed down at me. One bloke flicked his fag ash at me. I looked up at him pitifully. His response was to do it again.

More people came into the room. I was lifted up and put back onto a chair and re blindfolded I hoped it wasn’t just a fresh crew coming in to take over from where the others had left off.

“What is your name?” I heard from a new voice in excellent English.

“Andy.”

I didn’t give my full name. I was determined to drag this out as long as I could. My surname was a whole new question. The trick is to use up time, but at the same time to appear to be wanting to help.

“How old are you, Andy? What is your date of birth?”

His diction was very precise, his grammar better than mine. The slight Middle Eastern accent was barely detectable.

I gave him the answer.

“What is your religion?”

Under the terms of the Geneva Convention he wasn’t allowed to ask that one. The correct response should have been: “I cannot answer that question.”

“Church of England,” I said.

It was inscribed on my ID tags and they had them, so why should I risk another filling in over information that they already had? I hoped the information would help confirm that I was from England, not Tel Aviv as the crowd had seemed to believe.

Church of England meant nothing to them.

“You are Jewish?”

“No, I’m a Protestant.”

“What is a Protestant?”

“A Christian. I’m a Christian.”

To them, everybody’s a Christian who’s not a Muslim or a Jew.

Christianity embraces everybody from Trappist monks to Moonies.

“No, Andy, you are Jewish. We will soon find that out. Do you like my English, by the way?”

“Yes, it’s good.”

I wasn’t about to argue. As far as I was concerned, he spoke better English than Kate Adie.

I had my head down, swinging it from side to side, looking and sounding confused. There were long pauses while I appeared to be trying to think of things. I slurred my words, played on the injuries, played for time, dragged everything out.

“Of course my English is good,” he snapped, coming right up to my face. “I worked in London. What do you take me for-an idiot? We are not idiots.”

He had been asking questions from maybe 10 feet away, as if from behind a desk. But now he was up and walking around as he launched into a torrent of rhetoric about how intelligent and wonderful the Iraqi nation was and what tremendously civilized people they were. He was beginning to shout. Flecks of spit landed on my face. They smelled of tobacco and cheap cologne. The speed and harshness of his verbal assault made me wince a little; I clenched my teeth. I had to fight to control my reactions; I didn’t want him to know I was in a better state than he thought. You’ve got to take it for granted that these people are switched on.

“We are an advanced nation,” he spat. “As your country shall soon find out.”

I had been feeling a bit like a child on the receiving end of a scolding, who puts his face down while he’s being yelled at and his whole body starts to shudder.

He mentioned London and I thought, This is all getting on rather well here, we’re going to talk about London.

“I love London,” I said. “I wish I was back there now. I don’t want to be here. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just a soldier.”

We went through the Big Four again. In my mind’s eye I tried to race ahead and compare what I was going to say with what I’d already said. I could hear lots of writing going on. All the pens seemed very close to me. I heard paper being folded and the shuffling of feet.

My interrogator moved away and sat down. His tone switched to something soothing and approachable.

“I know you’re just a soldier,” he said. “I am a soldier myself. Let us just get this done in a civilized manner. We are a civilized nation. There are certain things we want to know, Andy. Just tell us. You’re just a tool. They are using you.”

It was pretty obvious what was going on. My job now was to make them think that their methods were working.

“Yes, sir,” I said, “I’m so confused, I really want to help you. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m so worried about my friend outside.”

“Well, tell me what unit you’re from. Just tell us and you won’t have to go through this pain. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

“I’m sorry, I cannot answer that question.”

It all started again.

When the new characters had come in, one of them must have slipped in behind me. When I gave the dud response, he must have got the nod because he threw a massive hook with a rifle butt into the side of my head. It took me straight onto the lino.

If you’re in a fight as a school kid you’re all revved up for it, and you’re expecting the blows. They don’t hurt so much when they come. If you’re not expecting it, the pain is intense. The shock from the rifle butt was horrendous. I passed out. I went to another world, and although it hurt intensely, it was actually quite a pleasant place to be.

As I lay on the floor, I noticed that my breathing was very shallow now and my heart was pumping more slowly. Everything was slowing down. I could feel myself gradually declining. I couldn’t swallow. Everything was a haze.

I took another blow from the rifle butt. Bubbles of vivid light exploded before my eyes. Then there was darkness.

I was semiconscious when they lifted me back onto the chair.

“Look, Andy, we just need to know some things. Let me do my job. We don’t have to do this. We are all soldiers. This is an honorable profession.” All of this in a low, soft, comforting voice. A sort of “Let’s get it over with, let’s be mates’ sort of tone.

“We could just leave you out in the desert to be eaten by the animals, Andy. Nobody would care, except your family. You’re letting them down, you’re not being brave, you’re just playing into the hands of the people who sent you here. They’re having a good time while people like you and me are fighting each other. You and me, Andy-we don’t want to fight this war.”

I was nodding and agreeing with everything he said, and all the time I was doing it the wonderful feeling was growing inside me that I had actually beaten him. He saw me nodding, but he didn’t know that inside my head my attitude was totally different. I started to feel better about my capture. Everything had felt so negative up till then. I was thinking: He must be believing this crap. He’s chatting away and I’m agreeing with him. I couldn’t believe I was getting away with it. I was on top of this discussion, and he wasn’t even aware of it. I’d got something over him. This could be the start of a wonderful relationship.

I was winning.

“Just tell us, Andy, and we shall send you back to England. What unit are you from?” He made it sound as if he had the power to summon a private jet there and then to whisk me back to Brize Norton.

“I’m sorry, I cannot answer that question.”

This time, as the kicks connected with my skull, there was a hissing, popping sound in my ears, and as I clenched my jaw, I heard the bones creak together. I felt blood trickle out of my ears and down my face. I was worried. Blood coming out of your ears is not a good sign. I thought, I’m going to be left deaf. Shit, I was only in my early thirties.

“What unit are you with?”

I was hoping desperately that he’d get on to something else, but he wasn’t going to let go.

I said nothing.

“Andy, we are not making much progress.”

Bizarrely, the voice was still soft and chummy.

“You must understand, Andy, I have a job to do. We’re not getting very far, are we? There is no big problem, just tell us.”

Silence.

More kicks. More punches. More screams.

“We already have this information from your friend, you know. We just want to hear it from you.”

That was a lie. He’d have got jack shit out of Dinger. Dinger was harder than me; he wouldn’t have said a word. The reason he had got himself so badly filled in was probably because he’d treated them like anybody else he didn’t like the look of and told them to fuck off.

“You must understand, I’m a soldier,” I said. “You’re a soldier, too-you must understand I can’t tell you this.”

I was trying to get some affiliation, I was trying to put it over in a sobbing, pathetic way. I hoped to appeal to their own traditional fear of loss of face.

“My family would walk around in shame for the rest of their days,” I cried. “They would be disgraced, I’d be discredited for ever. I just can’t tell you these things, I can’t.”

“Then Andy we have a big problem. You’re not telling us what we need to know. You’re not helping the situation, you’re not helping yourself. You could be dead very soon, for something that means nothing to you. I want to help you, but there are people above me who don’t want to do that. Admit it,” he said, in the tone of my best mate giving me advice. “You are an Israeli, aren’t you? Come on, admit it.”

“I’m not an Israeli,” I sobbed. “Look-I’m not dressed like an Israeli. This is British uniform, and you’ve seen my identification tags. I’m English, this is British uniform. I don’t know what you want from me. Please, please. I want to help. You’re confusing me. I’m scared.”

“This is stupid.”

“You’ve got my identification tags, you’ve seen that I’m English. I’m scared of what you’re saying.”

His tone suddenly changed. “Yes, we have your identification tags, you haven’t,” he exploded angrily.

“You’re who we say you are, and as far as we’re concerned you’re an Israeli. If not, why were you so near Syria? What were you doing? Tell me, tell me, what were you doing?”

Even if I’d wanted to answer, he wasn’t giving me time. He hit me with a nonstop torrent of questions and raging rhetoric. “You mean nothing to us! You’re nothing, nothing!”

It must have been fun in his house. The kids wouldn’t have known if he was coming or going.

What do I do now? I asked myself.

Let’s get back to the Israeli thing.

A dread was creeping into my mind concerning Bob. Bob had tight, curly black hair and a large nose. If he was captured or they found his body, he could be taken as Jewish.

“I’m British.”

“No, no, you’re Israeli. You are dressed like commandos

“Everybody in the British army wears this uniform.”

“You’ll die soon, Andy, for being so stupid, for not answering simple questions.”

“I’m not Israeli.”

It had got to the stage where I was having to remember what I’d been saying and what I had not been saying, because I knew that if these things were being written down-and I could hear the scribbling-I was going to get myself into severe shit.

Let’s keep on the Israeli thing. Maybe if this character keeps on talking to me, we can get a relationship going. Him and me. He’s mine. He’s my interrogator. He just might} | take pity on me.

“I’m a Christian, I’m English,” I set off again. “I don’t even know whereabouts in Iraq I am, let alone if I’m near Syria. I don’t want to be here. Look at me, I’m scared.”

“We know you’re an Israeli, Andy. We just want to hear it from you.

Your friend has already told us.”

I thought, Dinger looks like he could be a bit Jewish also, with his tight, wiry blond hair.

“You’re commandos.”

In their army only commandos wear DPM.

“We’re not! We’re just ordinary soldiers.”

“You’ll die for being so stupid. All we want is simple answers from you. I’m trying to help you. These people want to kill you. I’m trying to save you. How do you expect me to do that if you’re not helping me? We want you to answer these questions. We need to hear it from you. You want to help us, don’t you?”

“Yes, I want to help.” I was sobbing again. “But I can’t help you if I don’t know anything.”

“You’re so stupid.” The voice was aggressive, but he mixed some compassion with it. “Why aren’t you helping us? Come on, I’m trying to help you. I don’t want you to be in this situation any more than you do.”

“I want to help you, but I’m not an Israeli.”

“Just tell us and we’ll stop. Come on, you’re so stupid, aren’t you? What’s the matter? We’re civilized people. But I need you to tell me that you’re an Israeli. If you can’t tell me that, then tell me why you’re so near Syria?”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“You’re near Syria, aren’t you, so just tell me. These people will kill you. Your friend’s okay, your friend has told us. He will live, but you’re going to die, for something stupid. Why die? You’re stupid.”

I heard his chair scrape on the floor. I was trying to take in what was going on without showing that I could focus. I was physically wrecked. I was hoping for just the slightest hint of humanity in this man. Shit, I could always turn the waterworks on so easily as a kid, win my aunties round, and get a packet of crisps. What was wrong with these people?

I was going for an Oscar without a doubt-but a good percentage of what I was doing was for real. I was in real pain. It was a good catalyst for the reaction I wanted to portray. It was good to have this Israeli thing. Let’s keep on that and hopefully they’ll keep away from the other questions.

“I can’t help you, I just can’t help you.”

I heard a big sigh, as if he was my best mate in the world and there was nothing left he could do to help me. The sigh said: I am your contact; it’s only me that’s keeping everybody at bay.

“Then I cannot help you, Andy.”

As if on cue I heard another chair scrape and feet moving towards me. When I smelt the waft of aftershave, I just knew that the lad who was a dab hand with the rifle butt was on his way over to give me the good news.

He was, too. He really read me my horoscope.

I must have been getting used to being blindfolded because my senses of hearing and smell seemed to be more acute. I was starting to tell these people apart by their smell. The boy who was handy with the rifle butt wore freshly laundered clothes. Another one liked pistachio nuts. He’d put them in his mouth and chew, then gob the mashed shell into my face. The one who spoke good English smoked incessantly and had breath that smelled of coffee and stale cigarettes. When he launched into rhetoric, I got his spit all over my face. He also stank like a color supplement aftershave ad.

His chair would scrape, and I’d sense him moving around. He’d speak like a gatling gun, then he’d do the Nice Guy bit and give me lots of “Everything’s quite okay, it’s going to be all right.”

As he was chatting very gently, I could hear him getting closer and closer until we were nose to nose. Then he’d yell in my ear.

“This is no good, Andy,” he said. “We shall have to get this out of you another way.”

What worse way could there possibly be of doing it? We’d had intelligence reports of interrogation centers and mass killings, and I thought, Here we go, we’re going to get severely dealt with now. I had visions of concentration camps and electrodes clamped to my bollocks.

Two of the boys set to with rifle butts.

One particularly heavy blow caught me on the jaw, directly over my teeth. Only the skin of my cheek lay between the edge of the butt and two of my back molars. I felt the teeth crack and splinter, and then the pain of it hit me. I was down and screaming my head off. I tried to spit out the fragments, but my mouth was too swollen and numb. I couldn’t swallow. The moment my tongue touched the sharp, tender stumps I passed out.

I came to on the floor. The blindfold had fallen off, and I watched as blood poured from my mouth into a pool on the cream lino. I felt stupid and useless. I wanted nothing more than for the handcuffs to fall off so I could get up and deal with these guys.

They carried on, giving me some good stuff around the back with the butts, twat ting my head, legs, and kidneys.

I couldn’t breathe through my nose. When I screamed, I had to draw breath through my mouth, and the air hit the exposed nerve pulp of my broken teeth. I screamed again, and went on screaming.

It was getting outrageous.

They picked me up and put me back on the seat. They didn’t bother putting the blindfold back on, but I kept my head down anyway. I didn’t want eye contact, or to risk another filling in for looking up. I was in enough pain. I was a big, incoherent mess, honking away, sniveling to myself as I slumped on the chair.

My coordination was well and truly gone. I couldn’t even keep my legs together any more. I must have looked like Dinger’s double.

There was a long silence.

Everybody was shuffling around, leaving me to ponder over my fate. How long could I go like this? Was I going to get kicked to death here or what?

There was a lot more sighing and clucking.

“What are you doing this for, Andy? For your country? Your country doesn’t want to know you. Your country doesn’t care. The only ones who will really worry will be your parents, your family. We don’t want a war. It’s Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major. They’re sitting back there doing nothing. You’re here. It’s you that will suffer, not them. They’re not worried about you.

“We’ve had war for many years. All our families have suffered. We’re not barbarians, it’s you who are bringing in war. This is just an unfortunate situation for you. Why don’t you help us? Why are you letting yourself go through all this pain? Why do we have to do this sort of thing?”

I didn’t answer, I just kept my head down. My game plan was not to go into the cover story straightaway, because then they’ve got you. I was trying to make it look as if I was prepared to give them the Big Four and that was all. Queen and country and all that. I would go through a certain amount of tactical questioning and then break into my cover story.

They were talking between themselves in low tones, in what I took to be quite educated Arabic. Somebody was scribbling notes.

The writing was a good sign. It intimated that there wasn’t just a big frenzy going on, with them getting what they could and then topping me. It made it seem there was a reason for not shooting me. Was there some sort of preservation order on us? It gave me a sense of security, a feeling that some officialdom somewhere was directing operations. Yes, said the other side of my brain, but you’re getting further and further down this chain, and the longer this goes on the less chance you have of escaping. Escaping must always be foremost in your mind. You don’t know when the opportunity is going to arise, and you’ve got to be ready. Carpe diem! You’ve got to seize that moment, but the longer you are in captivity the more difficult it becomes.

I thought about Dinger. I knew he wouldn’t have substantiated any of this stuff about Tel Aviv. He would have done as much as he could, and when he decided that he’d physically had too much and was going to be kicked to death, he’d have started to break into the search and rescue story.

It occurred to me I might feel better if I could see my environment, absorb my surroundings. I looked up and opened my eyes. The Venetian blinds were down, but one or two thin shafts of light shone through.

Everything was twilighty and in semi shadow

The room was quite large, maybe 40 feet by 20. I was sitting at one end of the rectangle. I couldn’t see a door, so it had to be behind me. The officers were at the other end, facing me. There must have been eight or nine of them, all smoking. Smoke haze hung from the ceiling, pierced here and there by the sun coming through the blinds.

Halfway down the room, on the right hand side as I looked at it, was a large desk. On it were a couple of telephones and piles of normal office paper, books, and clutter. A big leather executive-style chair was empty. Behind it was the world’s biggest picture of Saddam in his beret, all the medals on, smiling away. I guessed it was the local commander’s office.

General admin notices hung on the wall. In the center of the lino floor and continuing under the desk was a large Persian carpet. On the left, facing the desk, was a large domestic-type settee. The rest of the walls were lined with stack able plastic chairs. Mine, the guest chair, appeared to be a plastic cushioned dining chair.

More tut-tut-tuts and sighs. People were talking to themselves as if I wasn’t there and this was just a normal day at the office. I rolled my head, and blood and snot dribbled down my chin. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear the agony in my mouth.

I worked out the options. If they started to fill me in again, I’d be dead by the end of the afternoon. The time had come to start spilling the cover story. I would wait for them to initiate it, and I’d go ahead.

When I had refused to answer their questions, I wasn’t being all patriotic and brave-that’s just propaganda that you see in war films. This was real life. I couldn’t come straight out with my cover story. I had to make it look as if they’d prized it out of me. It was a matter of self-preservation, not bravado. People sometimes do heroic things because the situation demands it, but there’s no such thing as a hero. The gung ho brigade are either idiots or they don’t even understand what’s happening. What I had to do now was give them the least amount of information to keep myself alive.

“Andy, you’re just sitting there. We’re trying to be friendly, but we have to get the information. Andy, this could go on and on. Your friend’s outside, he’s helped us and he’s Okay, he’s out there on the grass, he’s still alive, he’s in the sun. You’re in here in the dark. This is no good for you and it’s no good for us. It just takes up our time.

“Just tell us what we need to know and that’s it, everything’s ended. You’ll be Okay, we’ll look after you until the end of the war. Maybe we might be able to organize it for you to go home to your family straightaway. There’s no problems, if you help us. You look bad. Are you aching? You need a doctor-we’ll help you.”

I wanted to appear utterly done in. “Okay,” I said in a hoarse whisper, “I can’t take any more. I’ll help you.”

Everybody in the room looked up.

“I am a member of a search and rescue team who were sent to lift downed pilots.”

The interrogator turned around and looked at the others. They all came forward and sat on tables and desks. Everything I said had to be translated for them.

“Andy, tell me more. Tell me all you know about the search and rescue.”

His voice was very nice and calm. He obviously thought he’d cracked it, which was fine-that was exactly what I wanted him to think.

“We’re all from different units in the British army,” I said, “and we’re all drawn together because of our medical experience. I don’t know anybody, we were just brought together. I’m medically trained, I’m not a soldier. I’m stuck in this war and I don’t want to be a part of it. I was happy working back in the UK on sick parades, and all of a sudden they’ve put me on one of these search and rescue teams. I haven’t got a clue about any of this, I’m a medic, that’s all I am.”

It seemed to go down rather well. They chatted about it amongst themselves. It obviously squared with what Dinger had told them.

The trouble is, once you start there’s that chink in the armor, and you’ve got to carry on with the story. If there’s too much detail, you’ll start cocking things up for the other prisoners. You have to try to keep your story nice and simple-then it’s easy for you to remember as well. The best way to achieve that is to be the total bag of shit. You can’t remember because you’re in such a bad physical state. Your mind just can’t recollect anything; you’re just a thick, bone squaddy, one of the minions, and you haven’t got a clue, you don’t even know what kind of helicopter it was. My mind was racing to think of the story and what I was going to say next.

They knew I was a sergeant, so I threw that one in again. In their army, sergeant is a buckshee rank. It’s their officers that do everything, including the thinking.

“How many of you were there?”

“I don’t know. There was lots of noise and the helicopter came down. We were told there was danger of an explosion and to run, and they just took off and left us.” I played the confused bonehead, the scared, abandoned squaddy. “I just do first aid, I don’t want any of this. I’m not used to all this. All I do is put plasters on wounded pilots.”

“How many were on the aircraft?” he tried again.

“I’m not entirely sure. It was nighttime.”

“Andy, what’s going on? We gave you a chance. Do you take us for idiots? Over the last few days many people have been killed, and we want to know what’s happened.”

This was the first time they had mentioned casualties. I had been expecting it, but I didn’t want to hear it.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We want to know who’s done it. Was it you?”

“It wasn’t me. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“You must give us a chance. Look, just to show you how much we want to help you: You tell me your mother’s and father’s names, and we will write to them and let them know you’re all right. You write them a letter and put the address on, and we’ll post it.”

It was something straight out of training. You are taught never to sign anything. This goes back to Vietnam days where people signed pieces of paper in all innocence, and the next thing they knew there was a statement in the international press saying that they’d slain a village full of children.

I knew it was bollocks. There was no way they’d actually send a letter to Peckham. It was fantasy land, but I couldn’t just come out with Fuck you, big nose. I had to get round this somehow.

“My father died years ago,” I said. “My mother went away with an American who was working in London. She’s somewhere in America now. I haven’t got any parents; it’s one of the reasons I’m in the army. I’ve got no other immediate family.”

“Where did he work in London, this American?”

“Wimbledon.”

Another classic. They were trying to get me to open up my heart, and everything would come rolling out. I’d been put through all this before in E amp;E and capture exercises.

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t live at home then. I had big family problems.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No.”

I wanted to base my lies on the truth. If it’s something that you know and it’s the truth, you stand a better chance of remembering it. And they might run a check and be able to confirm that what you’re saying is true and not go any further into it. I had in my mind a friend who had been in that sort of family situation. His father died when he was 13. His mother met an American, wanted nothing more to do with the son, and buggered off to the States. As far as I was concerned, it sounded quite convincing.

I took my time. My speech was slurred, I was still dribbling, I couldn’t talk properly.

“Are you in pain, Andy? Help us and everything will be fine. We’ll get you medical attention. Carry on, tell us more.”

“I don’t know any more.”

Then another classic. He must have been working his way through the manual.

“Sign this piece of paper, Andy. All we want to do is prove to your family that you’re still alive. We will make attempts to find your mother in America. We have contacts there. All we need is your signature so she knows you’re Okay. And we can actually prove to the Red Cross that you’re still alive, you’re not dead in the desert, and the animals aren’t eating you. Think of it, Andy. If we get you to sign your name and go to the Red Cross, we’re not going to kill you.” I couldn’t believe anybody would actually come out with such a comical ploy. I tried to be noncommittal. “I don’t know any addresses, I haven’t got any family life.”

You could give a fictitious address, or you could give a real address in case they checked up. But Mrs. Mills of 8 Acacia Avenue might open her door one morning and get blown away. You never know how far this sort of thing will go.

“Andy, why do you keep on obstructing us? Why are you doing this to yourself? These people, my superiors, they won’t let me help you unless you tell them what they need to know. I’m afraid I can’t help you any more, Andy. If you don’t help me, I can’t help you.”

He just walked away. I didn’t know what to expect now.

I had my head down, and I could hear them coming up. I clenched my jaw and waited for it. This time there were no rifles, just several quite severe smacks around the face. Every time they hit near the broken teeth I screamed.

I shouldn’t have done that.

They pulled my head up by the hair to get a better aim. Then they slapped several more times over the site.

The slaps became punches that knocked me off the chair, but it wasn’t very exciting compared with the last beating. Probably they thought they’d now cracked it and I just needed a bit more encouragement. It lasted less than a minute.

Back on the chair, I was breathing heavily, blood trickling down my front.

“Look, Andy, we’re trying to help you. Do you want to help us?”

“Yes, I do, but I don’t know anything, I’m helping you as much as I can.”

“Where are your mother and father?”

I went through the same story.

“But why don’t you know where your mother is in America?”

“I don’t know because I have nothing to do with her. She didn’t want me. So she went to America and I joined the army.” “When did you join the army?”

“When I was sixteen.”

“Why did you join?”

“I’ve always wanted to help people, that’s why I’m a medic. I don’t want to fight. I’ve always been against fighting.”

This business about family was a red herring. I didn’t know if it was just a matter of pride that he wanted to crack it.

“Andy, look, obviously this way is not working.”

The filling in started again.

Your body adapts and it passes out quicker. Your mind is working in two ways. One half is telling you you’re out of it, and the other half really is out of it. It’s like lying on your bed when you’re pissed-your mind is spinning and a little voice is saying: Never again. This time I was totally out of the game. It was a good kicking. I wasn’t exaggerating anything after this one. I was incoherent. I flaked out, and when I came to I was still incoherent.

What woke me up was a boy stubbing his cigarette out on my neck.

I was in blackness, blindfolded and handcuffed, lying face down on grass. I had an excruciating headache. My ears tingled and burned.

I felt sunlight on bits of my face. I sensed the brightness of it. My mind was a blur, but I worked out that at some stage I must have been dragged from the room and trussed up outside. I wanted to rest my head, but I couldn’t lie on one side because of the swelling, and I couldn’t rest on the other because of the cuts.

I heard Dinger’s voice just behind me. They were stubbing cigarettes out on him as well. It was good to hear him, even though he was moaning and groaning. I couldn’t see him or touch him because I was facing the other way, but I knew he was there. I felt a bit safer.

There must have been three or four guards using us as ashtrays. They’d had a bad time with us over the last few days, and they were obviously enjoying getting their own back.

Other squad dies came around to see the sideshow and get in a poke and a kick. They gob bed on us and laughed. One put a lit cigarette behind my ear and left it there to burn down. His mates loved that one.

Even though I was blindfolded, I kept looking down, trying to look scared. I wanted to see Dinger. I needed the physical contact with him, I needed to feel near him. I wanted some form of attachment.

I was writhing face down as the cigarette burned behind my ear and managed to wiggle the blindfold down my nose. I could see daylight at last. You have a horrible sense of insecurity when you’re blindfolded because you’re so vulnerable.

If this is my last hour, I said to myself, let’s see as much as we can. It was a lovely clear sky. We were under a small fruit tree with a little bird in it. It started singing. The odd vehicle would start up about 60 feet away, there was talking, it was all rather sedate and nice. On the other side of the wall there was the hustle and bustle of the town, the hooting and revving of vehicles and general shouting. I heard the main gate open and close about 150 feet away, vehicles drive out and fade away. It felt as cozy and safe as being in a walled garden in a different century.

I thought: I’ve seen and I’ve done as much as I can. If it’s going to happen, let’s do it now. I didn’t have much thought about Jilly or Kate. I’d gone through all that in the culvert, thinking there wasn’t much I could do about it, this was not the time to worry about them. I’d done the best I could to look after them financially. I’d got the letters sorted out, and at the end of the day they knew that I loved them, and I knew that they loved me. There were no big problems; they’d be told I was dead and that would be that.

There were other things I wanted to concentrate on now. In Breaker Morant, the film about the Boer War, as the characters walked to the spot where they were going to get executed, they reached out and held hands. I didn’t know whether I wanted to physically grab hold of Dinger or whether I wanted to say something. I just wanted some sort of connection with him for my last moment.

More squad dies came round, kicking and poking. They looked down at these two pathetic messes on the ground, and they gob bed and took the piss, giggling like a bunch of kids, which some of them probably were. But none of it seemed as bad as before. Either the novelty was wearing off for them or I was just getting used to it. I just kept my head down and clenched my teeth. Both of us moaned and groaned with each kick because it hurt-but it was not so much the power of the kick as the effect it had on the aches and pains from before. They denounced Mitterrand and Bush, and when they saw my blindfold was down, they did cutthroat signs and waved their pistols and mimed bang-bang. I could have taken it if it was part of a master plan, but these wankers were just doing it for their own enjoyment.

Vehicles started up, and the drivers revved the engines. There was a lot of shouting and barking of orders from the buildings behind us, and that got me flapping. It was a horrible sinking feeling: Here we go again, I thought, why not another hour here? It’s all rather nice in the sun; we’ve had such a good period of sedation.

I hoped the noise came from officers and it didn’t just mean that the jundies were getting all sparked up again. You felt there was some purpose with the officers; you could converse with them quite well. With the squad dies it was just boots and fists.

Vehicle doors were slamming. There was a general hum of activity. Something was definitely about to happen. I braced myself, because it was going to happen whether I liked it or not.

I didn’t know what I was going to shout to Dinger. “God Save the Queen!” maybe. But then again, probably not.

Somebody untied my feet, but the blindfold and handcuffs stayed in place. Hands on either side grabbed me roughly and hauled me upright. My body had started to seize up after the long rest. Bruises throbbed. Cuts which had clotted were reopened as I was pushed and shoved. My feet wouldn’t carry me and I had to be dragged.

I was thrown onto the back of an open pickup and man handled to the front. They bent me over the cab, a jundie either side of me; I assumed I was being taken away to be shot. Was this the last time I was ever going to see or hear anything? My great game plan to say something to Dinger had gone to rat shit, and I was annoyed with myself.

They took my blindfold off, and I blinked in the harsh sunlight. There was nothing in front of us. They wouldn’t let me turn around, so I couldn’t tell if Dinger was behind. The jundies were banging on the roof; the driver and passenger had their arms out, and they were slapping the metal as well. There were happy noises everywhere.

One of the ruperts came up and said, “We are now going to show our people.”

I was still trying to adjust my eyes, totally bemused by the noise and the sun. We seemed to be part of a convoy of five or six brand-new Toyota pickups and Land Cruisers. Some still had the plastic over the seats. They were covered with desert dust, however, and they’d had to scrape it off the rear windscreen of the cab beneath me so the driver could see out.

They opened up the large double gates for the vehicles to come out of the camp, and we were greeted by the surging roar of a crowd, as if two Cup Final sides were emerging from the tunnel at Wembley. There was a solid mass of people ahead of us-women with sticks, men with guns or stones, all dressed in their dish-dashes and waving pictures of Saddam Hussein in their hands. Some were jumping up and down with joy; others were ranting rhetoric, pointing and throwing stones. The jundies tried to stop them because they were getting hit as well.

And this was just as we drove out of the gate. I thought: That’s it, we’re off to be shot without a doubt. We’ll have a quick drive around town, they’ll make a video, and then they’ll do the business.

We turned right onto the main boulevard, and the crowd surged around us. We had to stop almost immediately, as the jundies tried to push people off and the driver jammed his hand hard on the horn. We inched forward, trying to pave a way through the mob. They chanted “Down with Boosh! Down with Boosh!” and I just stood there like the president at the head of a cavalcade.

The squad dies were chuffed as hell. Everybody was firing into the air. Even kids of ten were letting rip with AKs. All I could think was: One of these rounds is going to hit me. It was such a lovely hot day as well.

I got twatted now and again by a stick or stone. The jundies either side of me were jumping up and down with excitement. I only had socks on my feet, and they landed on them with their boots. I felt weak and wanted to lean against the cab, but they pulled my head back to make sure everybody could see me.

Dinger came up on the right-hand side. He, too, was riding a Toyota pickup. As he drew level, we got some eye-to-eye and managed to swap a smile. It was the best thing that had happened all day. Dinger was looking how I felt. He was the bog monster at the best of times, but I looked at him and thought: Fucking hell, I didn’t know he could get even uglier than he was. It was the happiest time since the capture, without a doubt. The wink and the small smile, that was all I needed. I drew immense strength from that one small gesture. It was a matter of personal credibility. If he could get through this and grin about it, I thought, fuck it, so can I. I felt incredible affection for him, and I hoped that he did for me. This, as far as I knew, was my last look at a mate.

We trundled along on our carnival floats, driving down the main boulevard of the town. The crowd chanted and shook their fists. The noise was incredible. They didn’t even know who or what we were. We could have been spacemen for all they knew, but whatever, we were the bad guys.

Some of the squad dies were chanting with them. Others were running around trying to control the crowd. All of them were trying to avoid the stones and sticks that were meant for us. There were bursts of fire going off all over the place, the jundies with us firing in the air as well.

“Down with Boosh.” Boosh!”

People were diving in and out of the little Arab shop fronts with their concertina railings. “Thou shalt not steal,” the Koran proclaims, but everywhere you go in the Middle East the shops have these railings as security against thieving fellow Muslims. Everybody had pictures of Saddam and was pointing at his face and kissing it and shouting up to Allah.

We would move at walking pace, then stop for a bit to move the crowd. My legs couldn’t hold me up. I looked over at Dinger, and he was grinning from ear to ear. I wondered what on earth he was laughing at; I thought he’d gone demented. Then I realized: He was taking the piss out of them! I thought, Blow this, we’re on our way to die here, so who gives a monkey’s? I started myself. Fuck ‘em! Suddenly all that mattered to me was not looking a bag of shit. You’ve got to make sure you look good. I got some eye-to-eye going with the crowd and smiled away. One of the guards spotted me and got the chance to look a right hard man, landing a slap and a punch. I looked at Dinger, and we grinned at them like Leslie Grantham opening a supermarket. If our hands hadn’t been tied, we’d have been doing the royal wave.

It really sparked them up, the grinning. Some took it well, most of them didn’t. They were going crazy. It was the wrong thing to do and totally counterproductive, but it had to be done. The guards gave us a slap to get us all subdued again because it made them look good. But what the hell, I felt better. A large white American sedan came through on the left-hand side. Two ruperts in it looked up, pointed, and laughed. They were in a good mood about it anyway. I gave them my big presidential smile in return. They loved it, but that gave the jundies the hump and they had another go at us.

We paid the price for all the piss-taking when we got to the other end of the town. Crowds of people were waiting for us, trying to break through the cordon, arguing with the squad dies because they wanted to have a go at us. They were jumping up and down, and it was obvious it was only a matter of time before the cordon was either broken or deliberately removed. My only worry was the thought of me getting shot and not Dinger.

I was dragged off the vehicle. I searched desperately for Dinger. I needed him. He was my only link with reality.

Then I saw that the same was happening to him and I thought: It’s going to happen round here somewhere.

I was not too worried about the actual dying bit. Never had been; just as long as it was as quick and clean as Mark’s.

Would Jilly ever know? Did she even know I was missing? Everything materialistic was squared away; there was nothing else I could have done for her. But it was the emotional thing: it would have been lovely to have the chance to say my farewells.

What a way to go.

Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck it!

The stench of the town was overpowering. They were primitive, caveman smells of cooking, old embers, and stale piss, mixed with rotting garbage and diesel exhaust.

The town was an odd mixture of the medieval and the modern. The main boulevard was freshly tarmacked; the rest was dust and sand. There were Land Cruisers straight from the showroom and jundies with shiny boots and clean, western-type uniforms, and the crowd in their stinking dish-dashes and flip-flops or plain bare feet. I was knocked to the ground at one point, and right next to my eye was a big toe splayed out like a split sausage, grimed with a lifetime of dirt. There were immaculately groomed officers and healthy-looking young soldiers, and the locals with just three teeth between them and even those were black and decayed, and Negro Arabs with scarred faces and white, scabby knees and elbows from lack of washing and moisturizing, and dusty, matted rasta hair.

The buildings were of mud and stone, square with flat roofs. They must have been a couple of hundred years old, and on their sides were the latest posters for Pepsi Cola. Old, skinny, mangy dogs skulked in the shadows, scavenging and pissing. Rusty tin cans lay in piles everywhere.

Running down the middle of the boulevard was a central reservation, and in the middle of it, just opposite us, was a children’s playground, full of tubular steel frames and swings in old faded blues and yellows. It was the sort of thing you’d find on a normal housing estate in Britain, but it looked so out of place and weird in this kind of world. They’d been fighting a war for years, and there was poverty, shit, and grind all around us. Fuck knows what the Arabic for “Tidworth” is but this was it-an old shit-arse tip of a place.

We were standing at the roadside awaiting death. The jundies grabbed us, but my legs had given up and I stumbled. They had to drag me towards my public. They showed us off like hunting trophies, pushing our heads up, making sure everybody got a good look.

I wasn’t smiling this time. I was looking out for Dinger; I was scared of losing him in the crowd. I just wanted to keep by him. I could hear him yelling and shouting as much as I was, and from time to time I caught glimpses of him. It was a bad time.

The mob ruled. I had been right cocky when we got dragged off the vehicle, but now I was plain scared. They were all warbling the Red Indian war cry. Were we going to be left to the crowd? Were they going to rip us apart? Old women came up and pulled my hair and mustache and hit me with sticks or punched. The men would start by poking, then end up punching and thumping. I fell to the ground, and all the bodies closed in. They thrust pictures of Saddam in front of my face and made me kiss him.

I doubted whether some of these people even knew there was a war on. As for the women, repressed by centuries of culture and religion, this was probably the one and only chance they’d ever have to strike a grown man.

As time wore on, I started to think that perhaps they were not going to shoot us after all. Surely they would have done it by now? Maybe there was some system for dealing with prisoners. Certainly the jundies were controlling the crowds as much as they could. They obviously didn’t want the local population to kill us, because I noticed that they were fending off any men they saw with rifles and pistols. Perhaps the parade was just a PR exercise, a morale booster for the locals and a chance for them to vent their frustrations.

Women were scratching and tearing at my skin. I had grease and old bits of food shoved in my face and pis spots emptied over the gashes in my head. Old newsreels of Vietnam flashed through my mind. I remembered images of pilots who looked beaten and pissed off getting dragged through towns they’d just bombed. It was exactly how I felt.

All I wanted was contact with Dinger-preferably verbal. I could hear him shouting as he was being filled in, but I hated not being able to see him. He was my only link to the world. I didn’t want to lose him.

I couldn’t move any more. I fell onto one of the squad dies and put my arms around him. The other lad came and helped him lift me. As they dragged me along the ground, the tops of my toes were scraped away. We had to stop now and again for a 60-year-old to come and punch me in the stomach. I was well and truly gone. I didn’t really care about anything any more.

I didn’t know how long it lasted, but it seemed like a lifetime. There was gunfire in the distance, and of fleets came running to try and control the soldiers, who in turn were trying to control the crowd. It was so ironic to be protected by the same jundies who an hour ago had been stubbing out their cigarettes on our necks. Then they were the bastards; now they were the saviors.

I heard Dinger retaliating. I knew we should be trying to play the useless being that’s not even worth worrying about. But we were tuned in to this drama now; we had got used to it, and it was getting on our tits. The time had come to do something about it.

I gave the old girls the evil eye, and they waded in. I went down on the floor under a flurry of slaps and scratching, and two soldiers moved in to pick me up. Still on my knees, I looked up at one of them and said, “Fuck you, you ugly bitch!” They understood what I meant; the translation was in my eyes. It was not a good move. The jundies picked me up. I shoved them off and said “Fuck you!” again. I didn’t give a shit now what they did; I was demolished anyway. But they’d suffered loss of face, so they had to give me the good news to restore their credibility.

I remembered a lecture we’d had from an American POW just before we left Hereford. He had been an aviator at the time of the Vietnam War, after transferring from the Marine Corps. His Marine training had been that the harder you are and the more aggressive you are if you’re captured, the sooner your captors will leave you alone. He stood there in front of us hardened cynics at Hereford, crying his eyes out as he told us about the five years he had been a prisoner of the Viet Cong.

“What a load of shit,” he said. “The unbelievable nightmares and pain I went through because I really believed what I’d been taught.”

And I was doing exactly what he’d told us not to do. But you can’t just do nothing. Pride and credibility are at stake. I was suffering a massive loss of dignity and self-respect, and I couldn’t take any more. I knew it was totally counterproductive, I knew it wouldn’t pay off, but God it felt good. For one split second I was back on top, and that was all that mattered. I was not a commodity, I was not a bag of shit, I was Andy Me Nab.

The squad dies were giggling as we drove back to camp. They’d had a wonderful day out and were happy to leave me to my own devices on my hands and knees in a corner of the pickup, bleeding and gasping for breath as they smoked and laughed and relived the battle. I was rather pleased that it was over and done with and I hadn’t been shot.

It was more or less last light when we got back inside the gates, and they didn’t bother replacing the blindfold as they dragged me towards the single-story barrack block.

There were five beds around the edge of the room. The blokes didn’t seem to have lockers or any personal kit. All they had were the beds, with blankets on top-commercial, fluffy blankets with pictures of tigers and weird and wonderful patterns. On top of the blankets was their belt kit. Everything pointed to this being a transit camp rather than a permanent barracks.

The only light was from a paraffin heater in the center of the room. As it flickered, shadows flew around the room. It was beautifully warm-the sort of warmth that immediately makes you tired and sleepy. It was a warmth that I recognized. Even the shadows were familiar. A nice, comfortable, secure feeling washed over me. I was back at my Aunty Nell’s in Catford. I loved going there as a kid. She had a big three-bed roomed semi that she ran as a B amp;B. Compared with my family’s flat, to me it was a hotel. At night Aunty Nell would put the paraffin heater in my room to warm it through. I’d lie there in bed, nine years old and blissfully happy, watching the shadows dance on the wallpaper, looking forward to the next day’s meals. Aunty Nell used milk with the cereals instead of the hot water and a dash of Carnation I was used to, and she cooked packets of Vesta curry for her B amp;B guests. If my uncle reported that I had been a good boy, I used to be fed one as well.

The old boy, George, was a keen gardener. He had a massive garden with a shed at the bottom where I’d play. He was a crafty old bugger. He’d say to me: “Start digging around here, Andy lad, and you can count how many worms there are. We need to know how many worms there are so we can work out how good the mud is.”

I’d be digging away, a boy with a mission, and he’d be sitting there drinking tea in his deck chair laughing his head off. I never saw through it. I used to think it was great, counting the worms for my Uncle George.

I was left alone with my thoughts for twenty minutes or so, one hand cuffed to a metal fixture on the wall. I tried to get comfortable, but the cuffs worked on a ratchet-if you moved the wrong way they would tighten up even more. I got into a semi lying position, the hand defying gravity at an angle of 45 degrees.

I carried out a damage assessment. My whole body was aching, and I was worried I might have broken bones. My legs were the main concern. They were hurting badly, and I knew they couldn’t carry me any more. I checked the bones one by one, starting off with my feet, looking for deformities, making sure there was movement. Everything seemed Okay. There was a good chance nothing was broken.

I was breathing through crusted blood and dust and snot, and every time I blew to clear it the bleeding started again. I was badly cut. My face was swollen, my lips split, and every exposed area of skin was lacerated. Now that I actually had time to draw breath and think about it, my whole body was starting to sting. The scrapes were far more painful than the cuts. The framework, however, was still intact. The injuries were just muscular with cuts and bruises. I was weak and exhausted, but I’d still get up and run for it if the chance came.

I had been trying to gather as much information as I could to keep myself orientated. I went over what I’d seen and exactly where I was. I was annoyed that I hadn’t done a better job of it. I had been looking down too much when I should have been taking it all in. If I escaped and got past the gate, which way would I go? Would I turn left or right, or go straight? Which way was west? If I got out the back way, what then? How far inside the town was the camp? I’d need to get out of the built-up area as soon as possible. It was something I should have been checking as we drove out, but like a dickhead I’d let myself be distracted by the crowd. I was quite pissed off with myself for my lack of professionalism.

I went through the scenarios. The process was part fact and part fantasy. Fact because I was doing what you’re supposed to do-appreciations on how you’re going to get out. Fantasy because I was imagining me actually getting out and turning right, imagining what I would see and what would be behind me. I wanted to escape.

I looked around the room. Above me was a window. Only one of the sections was clear; the rest were boarded up where they had been smashed, or perhaps to stop the sun coming in. I could hear the soldiers mooching around outside, and in the middle distance there was shouting. The voices just outside the window were low and quiet, a mumble from no more than 20 or 30 feet away, and underneath the veranda, as if they’d been told to stand there and talk to make me flap.

I hoped Dinger was getting the same treatment as me because it was all rather nice sitting there on the carpet. It felt wonderful to be on my own. I felt quite happy and content in the dark, watching the warm glow of the paraffin heater and inhaling the familiar fumes. There were no hassles, just me on my lonesome with my hand pinned to the wall. It was real prime time.

I started to think about the patrol. Had the others been caught? Were they dead? Did Dinger know anything about them? Was I going to get the chance to speak to him?

I tried to keep as still as I could. My heart was pulsing slowly, and my body was stiff and aching. It was painful to move, and I wanted to find a comfy position and stay there. Some of the cuts had clotted to the fabric of my uniform; as I moved they reopened. Blood had glued my socks to my feet.

I must have looked like a vagrant. It was a week now since I had washed and my skin was black. My hair, matted from the drama of the E amp;E, was now caked with dried blood and mud. It was hard to make out the camouflage on my DPM because of blood, grease, and grime. My trousers looked like a biker’s jeans.

Why had we been taken back to the camp? I didn’t have a clue. This was obviously still the tactical questioning phase. I was waiting for something or someone. I took a deep breath, breathed out, and started to think about methods of escape. I suddenly remembered that I still had my escape map and compass. I could actually feel them in the draw cord of my trousers. I felt really good about that: at least I’d got something, I had the mental edge over them.

I thought about all the good stuff I’d done with Jilly, all the stupid holidays we’d had together, all the ice creams I had squashed in her face. Things came into my mind that had made me giggle with her, all the silly immature little things. I tried to visualize what she’d be doing right now. I had a pleasant picture in my mind of a Saturday two weeks before I left for the Gulf. Kate was staying with us as usual that weekend, and she was lying on the floor with me watching Robin Hood on video. Little John was doing his dance, and I got up and did it with her. We danced and danced around the room, trying to do high kicks, until we collapsed on the carpet, dizzy and laughing.

I thought back to the time of her very first Christmas. I hadn’t seen much of her because I was away when she was born in February and didn’t get back until she was six weeks old. Then I saw only the next three months of her, on and off. That Christmas I was free, and we were staying at a friend’s house on the south coast. Kate wasn’t sleeping very well, which I thought was great because it was the first time we’d had together alone. I got the pram out at midnight, wrapped her up well, and we went walking along the coastal path until six in the morning. She fell asleep after the first half an hour, and as I walked I just looked at her beautiful little face and clucked like a hen. When we got back, she woke up again so I put her in the car and we went for a drive. I kept checking over my shoulder to see that she was all right. She had fearsome big blue eyes that stared at me from inside all the wrappings of woolens and a bobble hat. It was a very special time. Soon afterwards I had to go away again, and in the next two years I only saw her for a total of twelve weeks.

There were noises outside. My little dream world was about to be invaded. I was flapping. Were they coming to give me another beasting? After the calm, it was a horrible, apprehensive feeling, a fierce dread of a world about to collapse. I put my head down and clenched the stiff, sore muscles. Shit, I thought, they’ve had their tuppence worth, why can’t they just leave me alone?

There was a draft as the door opened. I glanced up and saw a character in the middle of the room. He was in his mid-50s and only about 5’3” tall, with a big middle-age paunch beneath his woollen dish-dash. His mustache was well trimmed, and his jet-black hair was swept back. He had manicured hands, and his teeth flashed when they caught the light. He was ranting and raving at me in Arabic. The two guards who had come in with him went and sat on one of the beds, smoking and chatting, but keeping a watchful eye.

There was a pistol in the character’s belt, which I didn’t take much notice of to start with because every man and his dog was armed. He stood over the paraffin heater, hollering and gesticulating. With the glow of the heater beneath him his face looked like a Halloween monster with treble chins.

He came over to me and got hold of my face. He squeezed my jaw in his hand. The smashed teeth were agony. I groaned and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to know what was going on. He stayed close to me. I smelt spicy food on his breath. He prized my eyes open with his thumb and forefinger. What the fuck was he going to do?

He had an exchange with the guards, very fast and aggressive, then slapped my face a few times. I had no idea what he was on about. Then he walked backwards away from me and pulled out a Makharov pistol. This is all rather nice, I thought, what’s the story here then? He pointed it at me but he didn’t cock it.

Was this bluff kit or what?

The hammer of the Russian-made pistol stays to the rear when you cock it-i.e.” put a round into the chamber. If you pull the trigger, it will fire and reload itself again with the hammer still to the rear. If you don’t want to fire, you put the safety catch to safe. The hammer will still go forward but is stopped just short of the firing pin by the sears that come out because you have moved the safety catch. This is unlike some semiautomatic pistols. They still have a safety catch, but the hammer will stay to the rear when it’s applied.

I was looking in earnest to see if the hammer was back. If it was, I knew that he wasn’t bluffing, and that if he was nervous, he might have a negligent discharge and shoot me anyway. I looked at his face. His expression was very serious, and the eyes were welling up. I could see the shine of the tears. Our eyes met. He started to cry, and the pistol wobbled in his hand.

Surely the guards wouldn’t let him do it in their nice clean barrack room? But his eyes gave it away. He intended to pull the trigger, without a doubt. It didn’t look official. This was off the cuff. But the bloke had got the hump, so even if it was unofficial, so what? He’d do it anyway. I might get slotted here through emotion rather than a decision made, and I found that scary. The character really looked as if he might squeeze the trigger, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

Come on then, arse hole let’s get it over and done with. The guards seemed to wake up to what was happening. They jumped to their feet, shouting angrily, and grabbed his arm. They took away the pistol.

That single act gave me the biggest piece of information I had received since my capture: either these characters simply didn’t want to get their barrack block messed up, or, more likely, they were under orders to keep us alive.

One of the guards came over and squeezed my cheeks. “Son, son,” he said. “Boom boom boom.”

One of us had killed the man’s son. Fair one. In his shoes I’d be doing the same. Unfortunately it was me that he was doing it to.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with one of my arms up in the air, handcuffed to the wall. He came over and started to try and fill me in. I put my head down and brought my knees up, crouching forward to protect my bollocks. I got as close to the wall as I could. Only my arm was vulnerable now. It was funny, he had been willing to kill me with the weapon, but he found it quite hard to lay hands on me. He was kicking, but it wasn’t much good because he had leather sandals on. He’d throw a punch, but it had no weight behind it. He was clearly upset, but really he didn’t have it in him to do anything severe. He lacked aggression and strength, and I was delighted.

I was exaggerating, moaning and groaning as he kneed me in the back and slapped and spat. If it was my son who had been killed, and I was in the same room as the perpetrator, he’d have been honking good style by now. In a way I felt quite sorry for him, because his son was dead and he was too nice and gentle a man to do anything about it. Maybe, after all, he couldn have pulled the trigger.

The squad dies started to get bored-and perhaps a bit worried that they might have to clean blood off the floor and walls. They calmed him down and led him away. When they returned, they sat on the beds again and smoked more cigarettes.

“Boosh, bad, bad,” one of them said.

“Yeah, Bush, bad,” I nodded and agreed.

“Major,” he said, and did an oinking noise.

“Yep, Major’s a pig,” I said, and oinked.

They thought this was great stuff.

“You,” he pointed at me and brayed loudly.

“Me, donkey. Ee-aw!”

They held their sides and fell over on the beds. They rolled up.

They came over and poked me. I didn’t really know what they wanted from me, so I just did another loud bray. They loved it. I didn’t give a shit if they wanted to have fun at my expense. It didn’t mean a thing to me. I thought it was just as funny. I wasn’t getting filled in, that was all that mattered. It was absolutely splendid.

This went on for about a quarter of an hour. There’d be a couple of minutes’ silence, then somebody would get up and poke me again, I’d give them a good ee-aw, and they’d crack up. What a bunch of tossers.

I thought I’d try to have my handcuffs sorted out while they were in such a good mood. I was at a 45degree angle, and my hand was elevated. Gravity was pulling my hand onto the handcuff, and it was swelling up badly. It was agony. I wondered if they’d strap me onto something lower down, like a pipe.

I pointed at my hand and said, “Hurts. Please. Pain. Aaah.”

They looked at me and poked, and got another donkey bray. They had another roll-up, and I tried to indicate that my hand was agony. It didn’t work. They just laughed. Then they suddenly got all serious. They must have thought that it was time to assert some authority. So they started to carry out their own questioning, as if I was supposed to think they weren’t just guards, they were big-time interrogators.

“Who? Who?”

It was hard to make out what they were saying.

“What? I don’t understand.”

I kept pointing at my wrist, but to no avail. They asked more questions, their Halloween faces lit from below by the heater, but I couldn’t understand them.

One of them went and fetched another guard. He could speak fair English. They’d obviously told him that I couldn’t understand what they were on about.

“What’s your name?”

“Andy.”

“Commando, Andy? Tel Aviv?”

“British.”

“British. Gascoigne? Rush? Football?” He beamed big smiles and scored an imaginary goal with his right foot.

Everybody’s face lit up, mine included-even though football did nothing for me. When I was a kid, Millwall was the local team, but I only went to see them three or four times. I stood there like a dickhead on the terraces and wondered what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t see a thing because I was too small, and all I knew was that it had cost loads of money to get in. I went on a Wednesday night once and left halfway through because it was so cold. That was the extent of my football knowledge, and that was all football did for me-it reminded me of wet, cold, windy terraces. I had no interest in it whatsoever, yet here I was, a prisoner of soccer-mad Iraqis, and it might be my lifeline.

“Liverpool!” he said.

“Chelsea!” I said.

“Manchester United!”

“Nottingham Forest!”

They laughed and I joined in, trying to form some sort of bond. This was good, textbook stuff, but I couldn’t sustain it for much longer. My knowledge was just about exhausted.

“How long am I here?” I tried. “Do you know how long I’ll be here? Can you give me any food?”

“No problems. Bobby Moore!”

I thought I’d try another ploy.

“Mai? Mai?” I asked for water. I coughed dryly and gave it the old puppy dog look.

A bloke went out and came back with a glass of water. I gulped it down and asked for more. That cheesed them off so I just thanked them again and decided to keep quiet for a while.

They were all in their late teens, growing their first wispy mustaches. They behaved like young squad dies in any army, but what surprised me about them was the standard of maintenance of their uniforms and weapons. I had imagined the rag heads to be a bit of an undisciplined rabble, their kit dirty and shabby. But their uniforms were well laundered and pressed, and their boots were highly polished. Their weapons were in excellent order and well maintained. The buildings, too, were in a good state of repair, and spotlessly tidy. This was good; I felt that in their discipline lay some sort of protection for me. They were unlikely to do anything unless they were told to do it. It made me feel a bit happier that they weren’t just a bunch of head bangers rushing around wanting to kill and maim. Somebody, somewhere, made them clean their weapons; somebody, somewhere, made them clean their boots and their rooms.

What was more, there were obviously ways of striking up a relationship with these people, a fact which might help me at a later date. It was not just black and white in their eyes, as I was expecting it to be, with me the bad guy, them the good guys. There was this gray area of shared interest that we had already started to explore. So far, we had something in common in football. We were all talking and replying; it wasn’t just me on the receiving end of rhetoric, abuse, and tactical questions. Relationships, however tenuous, can almost always be formed, and in the situation I was in this could only be good. I had engineered getting the water, and in that exchange I was doing the controlling. Well, there was no harm being optimistic.

It went through my mind that maybe they were being friendly because it was all over now and the questioning was finished with. I was trying to think of all the optimistic things, but really you should be thinking of the pessimistic things, the worst-case scenarios, because then anything else is a bonus. At the end of the day they were just young lads. Dinger and I were the new kids in town, the commodities they wanted to have a look at, the new toys, the white-eyed prisoners. They’d probably looked on Dinger and me with a bit of awe, something to tell the grandchildren about. And now they’d seen us, spoken to us, taken the piss out of us, they were bored. They started to look tired, probably from the warmth of the heater and the excitement of the day. They tucked their weapons under their beds and got their heads down.

My mind turned again to thoughts of escape. I couldn’t get out of the handcuffs, and even if I could what was I going to do? Was I going to garofe them all and run away? Things like that just do not happen. It’s a fantasy that comes out of films. Are you going to kill number one without number five hearing?

My hand was fixed to the wall. I wasn’t going anywhere. There was nothing I could reach from where I was. I would have to wait for the next stage of transit or some other opportunity.

I was feeling a lot more at ease with my situation. I’d been caught, I’d gone through the initial drama, and now I was sitting in a warm room with people who weren’t kicking the shit out of me. I wasn’t going to be there for ever, but apart from the pain in my wrist, it was nice and relaxed. The people here didn’t want to fill me in; they just wanted to talk about Gazza and Bobby Charlton. I had the hopeful thought-and even as I thought it I knew it was fruitless-that maybe this was the way ahead: that they were fed up with me and maybe I’d just be chucked in as one of Saddam’s human shields.

As the night wore on, my arm and hand started to hurt quite badly. I tried to keep my mind off the pain by going through the escape scenarios again, doing my appreciations.

Out of the top of the window I could catch a little bit of the stars. It was a beautiful, clear night. I looked back at the sleeping jundies.

If I managed to get away, could I get to Dinger? Where was he? I was assuming that he was on the camp somewhere, but was he next door? I couldn’t hear anything. Was he along the veranda? I came to the conclusion that I’d have to grab the opportunity if it came, but I couldn’t leave without making the effort to get hold of him. I knew that he’d be thinking exactly the same, as any member of the patrol would. Was it worth waiting until we were together? No, I’d grab any opportunity that came along. So-what was the first thing I was going to do? How was I going to find out where he was? Was I going to look through the windows for him or was I going to shout? Would his guards be awake?

You’ve got to have a game plan and contingency plans. Hesitation is fatal. I would avoid being overt if possible-that’s just another bit of madness from Hollywood. In the films they come at you one at a time so you can slot them neatly like ducks at a fun fair In real life everybody jumps in together and they kick you to pieces. It would have to be as covert as I could make it: just get out, get some firepower, get Dinger, get a vehicle. Easy! All that in an enclosed camp with troops, and me with maybe a 30-round magazine.

Once we were out we would just have to move west. On foot or in a vehicle? Crosscountry or through the town? The drive from the culvert to the camp had been very short: we were still close to Syria. Our next transit was bound to take us into more secure areas, further from the border.

I dozed off and woke in pain. My head was hurting, my body ached. I had to sort out the blood and snot in my nose.

I heard hooting in the distance and the sound of vehicles. The big corrugated iron gates were being kicked open. It was still dark. People were walking along the veranda outside, guided by Ully lamps. They were talking. I felt a stab of apprehension. What was happening now? I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. One of the guards woke up and gave the other two a kick. They got to their feet.

The five or six blokes who came into the room were strangers. I felt helpless, that little kid feeling you get when you know you’re cornered by the rival gang. They towered above me in the shadows and flickers.

When my hand was released from the wall it was well past the pins and needles stage. It was swollen and completely numb. Two blokes held me either side and lifted me up. Somebody handed me my boots, but my feet were too swollen to put them on. I carried them the way an old granny carries her handbag, clenched to my chest. I wanted to keep them; I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days without any footwear.

As they frog-marched me outside I played on the pain, moaning and groaning. I must have looked a right dickhead. The blokes did lots of mock “tut-tut tuts.” One pulled a face of feigned concern and said, “We’re really worried about you.”

The cold air hit me. It was a refreshing, bracing feeling, but I would have preferred to be back in Aunty’s nice warm room. I started to shiver. It was a beautifully clear night. If we managed to get away, we’d be able to navigate westwards very easily.

Nobody said where we were going. They dragged me along, and I had to take silly little steps because my feet weren’t carrying me properly. We stopped by a Land Cruiser, and they shoved me into the back with my boots on my lap. They squeezed the ratchets of my handcuffs and tied a blindfold painfully tight.

I tried to lean forward to rest my head on the seat in front to relieve the pressure on my hands, but a hand on my face pushed me back upright. The interior light shone through the blindfold. I could tell there were two in the front. The door slammed noisily and made me jump. I clenched my teeth, ready for a twat around the head.

I was sitting on the right. There was the sound of shuffling to my left, then I heard: “All right, mate, all right, mate.”

Dinger was honking as he hit his head on the way in. This was really excellent news. I instantly felt happy, that wonderful feeling again of being in it together.

He was positioned with his knees pressing against mine.

“Can you help my hands?” I asked into the darkness.

I got hit around the back of the head, but it was worth it. I’d let Dinger know that I was there, and I’d learn that there was a guard in the back with us and that these people meant business.

The driver sounded like an officer. “You, no talking. Talking-boom boom!”

Fair one.

Every movement brought a retaliatory prod from the guard, but I couldn’t avoid taking deep, sighing breaths because my hands were so painful.

The vehicle stank of the usual cigarettes and cheap cologne. I ran through an appreciation. This transit probably signified the end of the tactical phase. We were getting moved further down the chain. I had no idea whether it was going to get better or worse. The optimistic side was saying: Right, I’ll just go to prison now. The professional side was saying: Let’s wait and see. You don’t know what’s going on.

I tried to concentrate on keeping my orientation. We came out of the gate and turned left. That meant we were heading east, not west, so we weren’t going in the direction of Syria. As if we would. He was driving like an idiot. Normally you’d consider it very handy to have a crash, but at the speed he was going we would all die in the wreckage.

I once saw a film of Houdini clasping his hands behind his back and stepping through them to bring them round to his front. I wondered if I would be able to do it with the injuries. Then I thought: You dickhead, you’ve never done it in your life anyway, what are you on about? But I would have turned myself into an elastic band if it had meant getting away. All I needed was an opportunity.

I felt incredibly tired because of the heater and the heavy cigarette smoke, but the pain in my hands kept me awake. As if to make sure we stayed awake, they put on a cassette of Arabic music. It was so loud that at first I didn’t hear the bombs falling.